In their adversely critical attitude towards administrative agencies, many lawyers and judges disclose a distrust of the expert, the specialist. That distrust is curious, for the position of our profession in society rests on the fact that we ourselves are specialists.

In the famous colloquy (perhaps partly apocryphal) which is said to have occurred about three hundred years ago between King James I and Judge Coke, the King remarked that, if “law was founded upon reason, he and others could reason as well as the judges,” and Coke loftily replied that lawsuits “are not to be decided by natural reason, but by the artificial reason and judgement of the law, which law is an art that requires long study and experience before that a man can attain to the cognizance of it.” The King, an intelligent amateur, was angered, for doubtless he saw that, as McIlwain observes, “if ... the law was to be supreme, at the same time a mystery open only to the initiated, it is clear that, if the claim of the lawyers were to be admitted, the supreme authority would be their exclusive possession.” Demos, now King, sometimes echoes James’ anger at the idea of a government of lawyers, not of men.

The present moment is a portentous one in the history of human relations. Only yesterday the armies of half the world were locked in a death struggle with the armies of the other half. And even now, as the representatives of the various governments gather together in attempts to organize an international State, the shadow of a weapon that threatens to end all life upon this earth lies athwart their deliberations. The moment with which we are faced is the more portentous because of the persistent hope man vainly entertains that a world of wholeness and peace will somehow issue out of these two warring and divided half-worlds. Even the student of behavior fondly believes that out of this divided world an undivided peace will come. Along with the rest of mankind even the seasoned psychiatrist fails to see that the overwhelming impetus to man's behavior—to his feeling and thinking—now stems from a social artifact of division. He does not see that, owing to a discrepancy in man's mental and social processes, the artificial world man has created is necessarily a world of conflict. In this hour of universal confusion and discord it would appear that we who study the problems of human adaptation are confronted with nothing less than a false, unilateral principle of motivation affecting the organism of man throughout.

In some ways, I think, the analytic method in philosophy and science suffers from an embarrassment of riches. It has too many distinctions—in the sense that any distinction which is infirm, but which is yet carted about along with the necessary apparatus of a method, is (at its most innocuous) superfluous. In these pages I propose to examine one such distinction.

A principle which is subscribed to by almost all of the “analysers” with whose work I am acquainted is that which is constituted by a certain kind of dichotomization between what we may for the present loosely characterize as the “formal” and the “non-formal.” Sometimes this distinction is presented as one existing between the “formal sciences” and the “non-formal sciences”; more frequently, perhaps, it is taken as a distinction holding between certain kinds of expressions, i.e., analytic and synthetic statements. It will be the thesis of this paper that there are good reasons for believing that this distinction in either of its forms is not a cogent one.

So obviously and blatantly real is the world around us—our own bodies and all things within reach of our senses—that from time immemorable man has tended to give it exclusive status—to feel that things in and related by space are the only realities. Such a belief is adequate for all practical affairs, but philosophers have always recognized that something is lacking in it. The very statement of the existence and reality of the external world brings in a second element: the mind that recognizes and admits it; the agent that by its own consciousness establishes the contrast of internal and external. This mind—the group of all our interrelated mental faculties, conceptions, and perceptions, and our consciousness of them—is definitely not something external, not something in space that can be handled physically, and studied in its mechanical and geometrical relationships. It is completely invisible, intangible, and inaudible, and obviously we neither taste nor smell it. It forms no part of the external world, and yet the very fact that we are conscious of the world is a tacit recognition of the mind that perceives it. An inevitable dualism seems to result between the internal mind and the external world it perceives, between the subjective and the objective.

The present attempt to indicate the general manner in which the kinship system of a people can be stated as an interpreted axiomatic system, with utilization of the symbolism of modern mathematical logic, is intended as a demonstration of the applicability of contemporary logical methods to problems in the social sciences. Aside from the obvious general advantages in the way of clarity and logical rigour to be gained by an application of axiomatic method, there emerges as by-products a convenient system of kinship symbolization and what is believed to be a solution to the long-standing controversy concerning the use of the terms ‘descriptive’ and ‘classificatory’ in reference to kinship systems. Since kinship terms are words in languages, the present exposition is perhaps of interest in that it shows how meaning in a semantic field of related terms can be defined by logical methods. So all the directional or temporal terms in a specific language might be treated as kinship terms are here. The possibility of a systematic treatment of the semantic aspects of linguistics which so far have resisted this type of treatment should be of interest to linguists.

The traditional attitude of philosophers towards the analysis of language is that it may have some corrective value, but can make no positive contribution to philosophy. The world must be investigated in itself: an analysis of the language in which we describe it will perhaps give us greater insight into the description, but not into what is described. Many philosophers have been suspicious of language, considering it a hindrance rather than an aid in philosophical investigation. This tradition has a long history, some of whose high points we can mention briefly.

The lucidity of Mr. Copilowish's argument makes the task of the reviewer very pleasant, even if he disagrees as completely as I do with the conclusion, which is the main thesis Mr. Copilowish attempts to prove. Only at one minor point does his exposition not quite suit my taste. He chose to preface his argument with a string of quotations supposedly supporting the position he wishes to defend. It seems to me that with the proper historical precautions these passages allow for a very different interpretation. Yet I shall not pursue this matter, partly because I believe that Mr. Copilowish merely followed a literary stereotype, but mainly because the issue ought to be discussed on its merits rather than through the clouds of witness one could adduce on either side.

Werkmeister's new book, The Basis and Structure of Knowledge is the second major attempt in recent years to defend the idealistic theory of knowledge. The first was Blanshard's Nature of Thought; and it is worth noticing that both authors, in undertaking the defense of a position long in the shadows, are well aware of contemporary developments in logic and technical philosophy. Werkmeister freely acknowledges his debt to Blanshard; yet his work differs in scope from the latter's in at least two ways. Firstly, the more recent book is concerned largely with the epistemological analysis of meaning and truth and hardly at all with what an older generation called “philosophical psychology,” while philosophical psychology fills all of the first and part of the second volume of Blanshard's work. In my opinion, this is all to the good. (That our generation inverts the error and too often indulges in psychological philosophy is another story!) Secondly, Werkmeister presents us with detailed analyses of scientific method, of the structure of scientific theories, and of mathematics, all three areas to which Blanshard pays virtually no attention.